Shakespeare’s play is drenched in moonlight; an image invoked often throughout the text, the moon makes an appearance to provide atmosphere and hint at the topics of lunacy and chastity.
As Ernest Schanzer notes, all but one scene—Act IV, Scene 1—of Dream are set during the nighttime. (Act I, Scene 1 is often set, by directors, in daylight; however, Theseus’s lines, “But, O, methinks how slow / This old moon wanes!,” may indicate a direct reference to the present moon in using “this” (1.1.3-4).) The play opens with lines referencing the moon; first, Theseus begs the moons to pass quicker in excitement for his wedding, “Four happy days bring in / Another moon. But, O, methinks how slow / This old moon wanes!”, (1.1.2-4), and then Hippolyta invokes the moon in thinking of the wedding ceremony, “the moon, like to a silver bow / New -bent in heaven, shall behold the night / Of our solemnities” (1.1.9-11). The bow is usually in reference to Cupid or fulfilled love. In associating it with the moon, however, the silver bow is a reference to Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, of chastity, and of the moon; the Amazons worshipped Diana as their primary deity. Thus, from the start of the play, the moon serves as a symbol of the battleground for sexual agency. Later in the same scene, Theseus invokes the moon in discussing Hermia’s options:
You can endure the livery of a nun,
For aye to be in shady cloister mewed,
To live a barren sister all your life,
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon (1.1.71-75).
Such lines, in their barren and negative connotations of the moon, would have offended Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, before whom some sources believe the play was performed, and who was commonly identified with Diana. (These lines envisage Hermia as Diana’s votaress.) Generally, however, the moon develops a characterization as “the stern guarder of virginity,” and bears witness as two women, Hippolyta and Hermia, attempt to resist patriarchal authority.
The moon develops, however, a second connotation—that of lunacy. When invoked in the name of love, the moon develops a characterization as madness; Egeus invokes the moon, “Thou, thou, Lysander…hast by moonlight at her window sung / With feigning voice verses of feigning love” (1.1.29-32). The nature of the moon, precisely, is inconstancy; as Juliet says to her Romeo, “O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, / That monthly changes in her circled orb, / Lest that thy love prove likewise variable” (Rom. 2.2.114-116). The moon bears witness to the chaos of the narrative middle as the lovers of Dream retire to the woods. Hermia rejects Demetrius in favor of Lysander, stating she’ll believe the impossible before believing Lysander left her:
I’ll believe as soon
This whole Earth may be bored, and that the moon
May through the center creep and so displease
Her brother’s noontide with th’ Antipodes (3.2.155-159).
Other characters, too, see the moon. Quince asks his players to “meet [him] in the palace / wood, a mile without the town, by moonlight” (1.2.97-98). Titania and Oberon meet, “by moonlight” (2.1.62). The artisans ask for an almanac to track the lunar year in order to determine if there will be moonlight on the night of their play: “A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac. / Find out moonshine, find out moonshine” (3.1.52-53). The beginning of Robin’s parting epilogue invokes the moon in establishing the setting once again, “Now the hungry lion roars, / And the wolf behowls the moon,” (5.1.388-389).
In summary: Shakespeare’s text has many, many references to the moon as present during the disorienting chaos of the narrative. In Shakespeare’s time, this repetition served a functional purpose; without the help of elaborate scenery or even darkness in the theatre’s afternoon performances to evoke nighttime, the text’s repetitive mention of this nighttime served to remind audiences of this detail of the play’s setting. As Schanzer writes, “Shakespeare achieves unity of atmosphere chiefly through flooding the play with moonlight.” Midsummer celebrations, after all, can be attributed more to the moon than the summer solstice. The embodiment of love-madness, the moon is ever-present in Dream—and then there’s Starveling’s performance as Moonshine!